Welcome, once again
Why now feels like the right time to return to the world of education blogging
Five and a half years ago, I began my second year of teaching with the ambition to start an education blog. I enjoyed writing, and had gained a lot from reading a wide range of education blogs during those formative training and NQT years (as it was known at the time). I therefore hoped to contribute to the conversation. However, let’s just say that going into a full teaching timetable for the first time in September 2020 was a little baptism of fire, alongside being a Year 7 form tutor to a cohort who’d had the most disrupted secondary transition in a generation. I just never had the time, and possibly the shortest-lived education blog stopped before it had even started.
Fast forward to today, and that cohort is now at sixth form or college. A few of them are into their sixth year with me as a form tutor, as I had the exciting opportunity to follow the year group and join the sixth form team in September.
I am now in my seventh year of teaching, rather than my second, so I am at a career stage where I feel much more secure in knowing what I am doing! The years in between have offered highs and lows, challenges and opportunities. I still feel there is a lot to be gained from reading education content across a whole array of platforms - namely, X (even if the glory days of Edutwitter seem behind us), blogs and, increasingly, LinkedIn. However, after a year in which I started contributing as well as consuming such content, as well as starting to consider in more detail my own career ambitions, the time feels right to start collating my thoughts, contributing to discussions and engaging in educational thinking through a wider lens than the MFL blog I originally hoped to curate.
With that, welcome to the Positive Classroom. In the coming days, I will outline the thinking behind the name and what you can expect to see. There will be a combination of whole-school and MFL-specific content, hopefully allowing me to utilise my subject specialism without being constrained by it. If you haven’t already, you can find me on X and LinkedIn. Between those outlets for shorter thoughts and this one for more considered writing, I hope that reflection and discussion will allow me to continue my own growth for my students in my classroom, and maybe even for yours, too.
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